ONE WAY STREET

2/8/2010: Sad news. Bobby Hoy passed away early this morning. He leaves a loving family and a legion of friends and colleagues who will miss him greatly. R.I.P. Here us a link to his obit in the L.A. Times.

It was my distinct privilege to attend the Golden Boot Award ceremony last week that honored Bobby Hoy.

Although One Way Street has been on an extended hiatus because of my on-going Michael Curtiz biography and a medley of other unapproved excuses, I have returned - a cyber-Lazarus - to proselytize for the cause of film preservation, specifically film noir preservation.

It’s been almost a decade since the Film Noir Foundation was formulated around Eddie Muller’s kitchen table. The Foundation came into existence partly due to the collective frustration of not being able to locate desired films to screen at the annual film noir festival in Los Angeles and the recently constituted Noir City fest in San Francisco.

The deeper motivation was the fear that these wonderful, darkly etched movies might simply disappear. Forever. 35mm movies are potential kin to the dinosaurs. Bluntly put, there is no universal system or program towards preserving our cinematic heritage. When a film is “lost” or beyond technical redemption; a portion of our collective culture leaves us all. A society that loses its history will inevitably lose itself.

For those of you who are not Facebook habitues, I wanted to post a link about the upcoming Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival next week 13-16 May in Palm Springs at the Camelot Theatres. It is our tenth anniversary and with a line up of rare films and guest stars such as Ernest Borgnine, June Lockhart, Ann Robinson, Julie Garfield and Tommy Cook, this year's fest will be landmark event. Hope to see you there!